As you know, I work in a Christian bookstore. We sell a ton of ridiculous Jesus-junk. If you put a cross on anything, it will sell. On the back row of our store, we sell tracts and other witness tools, many of which ask "how do you know you'll go to heaven?" or "what happens after death?" Some of these outline specific points and steps to believing and becoming a Christian. Billy Graham's "Steps to Peace with God" is our most popular and best selling tract. While all of these have positive intentions, I always feel like they don't tell the story well. Of course, if you want to know the rest of the story, just go read the Bible. But what I mean is that the gospel of Jesus has been essentially broken down into a formula, which reminded me of a chapter of "Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller which I am currently reading. Here is a sequence from the chapter simply called "Jesus". Sidenote: I recommend every believer, or skeptic alike, read this book.
"Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person to know Jesus they must get a kind of crush on Him. But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and so on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than what would be required by following a kind of recipe.
I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we sometimes hold up as credible: We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are American. If any of these models are true, people who read the Bible before we systematically broke it down, and, for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ.
It doesn’t make a great deal of sense that a person who went to Bible college should have a better shot at heaven than a person who didn’t, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense either that somebody sentimental and spiritual has greater access. I think it is more safe and beautiful and more true to believe that when a person dies he will go and be with God because, on earth, he had come to know Him, that he had a relational encounter with God not unlike meeting a friend or a lover or having a father or taking a bride, and that in order to engage God he gave up everything, repented and changed his life, as this sort of extreme sacrifice is what is required if true love is to grow. We would expect nothing less in a marriage; why should we accept anything less in becoming unified with Christ?
In fact, I have to tell you, I believe the Bible is screaming this idea and is completely silent on any other, including our formulas and bullet points. It seems rather, that Christ’s parables, Christ’s words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, were designed to bypass the memorization of ideas and cause us to wrestle with a certain need to cling to Him. In other words, a poetic presentation of the gospel of Jesus is more accurate than a set of steps."
Now my friend Micah will argue there is no such thing as "falling in love" due to the preposition used that implies that you could in fact "fall out of love", and that love is a continuous growth of feelings and emotions toward another. I agree with the rudimentary flaw in the slang use of the English language that Micah is addressing, but Miller isn't speaking of the act of falling in love. So don't let the slang terminology mess with what Miller is saying. As always, don't argue a point out of ignorance. If you don't understand the concept being described or the context, simply just go do the research for yourself and read the book. If you don't want to spend money on it, let me finish the book and you can borrow it.
